Wednesday, 28 October 2015

[video] Jolla Tablet review: Hardware, UI

After more than a hundred replies to the question on the desired focus of our Jolla Tablet review, I decided to split the rest for nice length. This part 2 focuses on the hardware quality and introduces the basic interface and the pre-installed apps on a first time booted Sailfish OS 2.0.0.10.

Good to hold on both orientations. Rounded edges have nice surface too.

Feels kind of tough, giving an impression of a longer lasting device

Tight microUSB slot, much better than on Jolla phone

WLAN dual band (2.4 / 5 GHz)

operating system: Sailfish OS with Android support (v 4.4)

Nice set of sensors

CONS

Loudspeaker placement and sound quality

Older Bluetooth 3.0 (wrong specs on manual, which shows 4.0)

Not fully open source (hopefully more later, however)

All plastic, no exclusive "wow" impression

No led, no camera flash, no vibration

Review on the hardware quality

The device feels solid to hold. Weight is all right, and the two rounded sides looks good and have a nice surface to grip. Two not curved white edges are smoother, so it's easy to keep them clean.

Overall size is excellent, big enough for nice display size, still small enough to fit into a bigger pocket.

Front side is buttonless, having a 2 MPix camera, microphone and sensors, all well hidden. It's all laminated glass and sliding your finger on the surface feels just right. The surface reflects some light and collects some fingerprints, but either doesn't disturb at all as soon as the the display is turned on.

Back side camera has 5 MPix with no flashlight. Also led is missing, so there's nothing showing notifications or the status of the device when the display is off. Some users might even take this as a nice feature - this tablet definitely won't disturb you.

Power button and Volume button are coated with the same white plastic as the white sides. Next to them there's a standard 3.5mm audio connector with a nice tight grip for the headphones plug.

On the "camera corner" there's Micro USB 2.0 slot (supports OTG) with a very tight grip for the plug. Cable is included, but charger is missing. 2.0A charger is recommended. It took me 4.5 hours to charge the battery (from empty to full) with one I luckily had. Charging from computer or with lower spec charger will take at least twice that time.

There's also a MicroSD slot supporting open standard memory cards up to 128GB. If you have an SDXC card, that will require reformatting to some open Linux standard. To make it easy, Jolla is planning to add the format option into the device settings.

Back plate looks and feels more like brushed metal, still being actually plastic, but it does add a fine touch into the pure, minimalist design. Talking about otherwise very nice design, stereo loudspeakers are placed on the bottom, sending voice away from the user, and in the worst case against the table.

Going on with the sound, correct stereo image requires that device is used on portrait orientation. On the other hand there are no tablets with a great sound quality anyway, so at least I prefer listening to music either using headphones or sending the audio via Bluetooth connection. The loudspeakers on Jolla Tablet have actually very bad sound quality, nice only for speech, but this really doesn't mean much in my case.

Our review device carries 32Gb of internal memory, but there's also another model with 64Gb. For all the details on the hardware, please visit our earlier review.

Entry level graphic chip for a Retina level display - let's see what's the overall performance in video / gaming / multitasking, follow up for the next part! We will find out if this is worth its price or not.

4 comments:

I'm planning to translate it into Chinese, can you please allow me to:

1. Translate the text article into Chinese & upload to jolla.comes.today (with source link) under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license2. Modify the video(only add the Chinese subtitle), upload to a cdn service(qiniu.com, because youtube is blocked in China), embed into the translated article (plz also tell me which license should I use for the chinese-subtitled video, because the original video is under youtube standard license)

Thanks for asking :) Yes, that would be fine, and you can use the same license for the video. By the way, the part 1 (Hardware specs) which you translated earlier is recently updated with new photos and info, feel free to use those similar way as well. All the best to China, hopefully one day we'll see more open internet there!

Thank you for your articles. I regret the purchase of my tablet a little bit. (Still waiting for delivery, was in early 2nd wave). Weak speakers like in the Jolla phone, unsatisfying camera, bluetooth 3, no usb c.......hardly any apps available. I think Jolla's decision to produce a tablet was a mistake.Now I opted for the Puzzlephone (Indiegogo) and I hope that many more people will do this. Of course with Sailfish. Good specs, good design and made in Europe!